The One With All The Pictures.

On to the eye candy. I started this project at the end of April and completed it the beginning of September. It started with a compulsion to make something a little more useful than I had been doing before. I made a shirt and dress which were auctioned off for this charity which I talked about in this post a couple of days ago.

First up, the dress:


Completely hand-stitched from reclaimed t-shirts. The blue ones are from the same golf tournament the year before. The flowers are relief appliques from still more t-shirts.



You can see the charity logo on the bottom left back which was reused from one of the volunteer t-shirts. This will fit as a dress from about 6 months until about size 2 as a shirt making it long wearing. I love that it can be used for a long time as kids grow out of sizes so quickly.



I was so worried about the buttonhole loops. I'd never done them before and left them for the last minute, but they worked out really well. You can see the vintage buttons and zigzag chain stitch here as well.



Palestrina stitch along the bottom hem. I love the look of Palestrina stitch - it's delicate and looks almost beaded.


And now on to the boy's shirt. Mothers of boys always complain that girls get all of the fun clothes, so I wanted to make sure I made something good for the boys. My daughter who's two saw this picture and said "There's my bear!". She loves this guy.



Again completely handsewn using reclaimed t-shirts. I enlarged the charity's logo to use as a pattern for this reverse applique.



I wanted the stitching on this one to be a lot simpler, but still let it have some details. This one is a 12 month size.



And a close up of some of the stitching. I used linen thread (brown) to give it a more rugged appeal.

It was hard to let them go after spending so much time with these two pieces, but both went in the silent auction and now have the most loving homes as well as having raised money for a charity very close to my heart.